SOURCE: Boyne, Roy. “Bourdieu: From Class to Culture, In Memoriam; Pierre Bourdieu 1930-2002.” Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 3 (June 2002): 117-28.

[In the following essay, Boyne compares Bourdieu's Distinction with The Weight of the World, tracing the differences in thought and empirical data that led to changes in Bourdieu's theory of sociology and art in later years.]

I will try to establish two things: first the continuing use but outdated nature of the model of working-class culture found in Distinction; second, the relationship between that model and the work which is reported in The Weight of the World.¹ I hope it need not be said that critique is the most serious form of high regard.

REMNANTS OF NECESSITARIANISM

The empirical work upon which Distinction was based is now more than 20 years old. Characterizations of the working class in terms of their unreflexive ‘choice of the necessary’, and of the cultured upper class as unreflexive in their beliefs in the timeless and asocial qualities of truth, beauty and progress, of which they are guardians, however, remain with us. They are no longer to be found so clearly in Bourdieu's later work. He called upon intellectuals (despite their cosmopolitan privileges underlined in the hidden contrapuntalism of The Weight of the World) to take a stand against the false unanimity of dominant discourse, to swap the illusio of autonomous aesthetics for the (much-to-be-preferred, and self-admittedly normative) illusio of Realpolitik and the preservation of the values and achievements of the cultural and scientific fields (Bourdieu, 1992: 348, 1998: 7-8). It is also the case that he developed confidence in the possibility of reflexive awareness, not only for intellectuals but also for the seriously disadvantaged. Speaking of the sociological enlightenment of those formerly characterized in terms of their necessitarianism, he later said, ‘you may be upset by what you are, but you have instruments to understand and to accept it and that is the main problem of life’ (cited in Swain, 2000). Just as it was 20 years ago when Bourdieu, in practice, accepted the condition of the working class but launched a critique of the illusio of the aristocracy of culture, so it was at the beginning of the 21st century with his calling for intellectuals to act together while nevertheless sometimes preaching a form of acceptance for the dispossessed. This is far from the only remnant of necessitarianism that we find when we look to reactions across the wider culture.

My first example taken from outside of Bourdieu's corpus pertains to critical reaction to the British film Billy Elliot. Eleven-year-old Billy's father and brother are both striking miners in 1984 Easington, in northeast England. Billy attends a boxing club in the community hall. This takes place at the same time as the ballet class for the young girls of this Durham coastal pit village. Billy has no talent for boxing, and presented within the film as a much less pre-determined figure than he would have been in Bourdieu's 1979 version of working-class necessitarianism, he creates an appetite and discovers a talent for ballet. Necessitarianism is, however, given a strong presence within the film through the characters of the father and the brother, who both try to call Billy to order, just exactly as Bourdieu describes the sanctions imposed on their own within the working class.² Thus Billy's brother's version of the demand for the refusal of ‘fancy nonsense’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 379) is to provoke and insult him: ‘Ballet, you twat!’ Both father and brother are eventually persuaded of the depth of Billy's desire, but although times are changing, as evidenced by Billy's ballet and the small leap made by his best mate who makes a pass at him, which Billy handles with a supportive refusal, neither father nor brother can shift that much: enough to support Billy but within the limits of their traditional loyalties. When Billy's father tests that, he is pulled back as he so clearly wanted to be.

Billy's resistance to the culture of the necessary is located at the end of a long line of exemplary exceptions: talent and determination can transcend origins and circumstances. There are good reasons to object to the portrayal of such exceptions as if they were the rule. Barbara Ellen, writing in The Observer (2000), put it like this:

The main charge against Billy Elliot has been one of sentimentality, but it is guilty of far worse than that. Daldry, and the screenwriter, Lee Hall, both come from working-class stock, but that doesn't give them the right to tell it how it isn't. There is no nobility in poverty, nothing remotely photogenic about life at the very bottom, very rarely a fast track out. Yet here Billy is, tap dancing and pirouetting out of the ghetto, and into the welcoming arms of the middle classes. The message is: if you're talented, if you work hard, you can escape, within 111 minutes. And this message is supposed to appeal to whom exactly—the working classes? Don't be silly.

Like Bourdieu's 1979 picture of necessity, Ellen's reaction to the film confirms the closed horizons of the working class in contrast to open possibilities elsewhere.

What keeps these horizons lowered? Bruno Latour, in a newspaper commentary on Bourdieu, had no doubt about the answer to that question:

It is not enough for someone to speak of the dominated to belong to the left. Everything depends on the way in which they understand and express the operation of power. Bourdieu's sociology begins with moments of consummate description, but then subjugates the multiplicity of expressions and situations to a small number of obsessively repeated notions which describe the invisible forces which manipulate the actors behind their backs.

(Latour, 1998)

We can add to these intimations that there are both internal and external forces (calls to order and invisible forces) reproducing the culture of necessity, that rumours of the death of the working class (due to labour-force changes resulting from globalization and technological advance, due also to changes in the nature of trans-social seduction into consumption, and additionally linked to class-transcendent identity issues related to age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and, perhaps in a minor key, a multitude of consumption-activities from salsa to sailing³ where skills and enthusiasms not economic structures are the foundation of reference groups) may be hard to substantiate. Roger Bromley (2000: 52) tells us about a 1998 ICM survey of UK class affiliation, which indicates that there might be a higher proportion of people now thinking themselves working class (55٪) than may have been the case 50 years ago. Abercrombie and Warde (2000: 148) point to a poll reported in The Guardian in the same year which declared that 68 per cent of respondents thought that Britain was ‘class-ridden’, and Beverley Skeggs's (1997: 161) study of class and gender is crystal clear that ‘[c]lass was completely central’ to the lives of the women with whom she worked. These are, of course, just a few of the examples that could have been selected. Although I think it is probably fair to say that, in the 1990s, class has lost its status as senior member of the pantheon of social divisions, so that it does not really surprise to read something like the following: ‘The rigid adherence to forms of ethnic and cultural essentialism tends to obscure cross-cutting social divisions such as class …’ (Ratcliffe, 2000: 180). It is not so long ago that we were talking about the cross-cutting divisions within class society.

While class remains salient, expressions of class cultures are much more marked by reflexive attitudes—rueful, ironic, envious, reflectively proud—than was the case in the picture painted by Bourdieu in 1979. Skeggs's subjects ‘were never able to feel comfortable with themselves’ (1997: 162); the music lovers discussed by Hennion and Maisonneuve (2000) make it clear that they know that their taste can be understood sociologically, even to the point where they can hardly admit (although they know of it) to the experience of unconditioned pleasure. Additionally, it is increasingly clear that other structural contexts, such as ethnicity, gender, age, medical status, are now routinely and reflexively incorporated into conceptions of self-identity. This was certainly shown to be the case in the report from the Runnymede Trust—a two-year enquiry into ethnicity in Britain by 23 ‘commissioners’ drawn widely from the very best UK theorists, researchers, activists, administrators, and community workers, chaired by Bhikhu Parekh—which makes it clear that ‘people have the capacity to manoeuvre between distinct areas of life and to be “cross-cultural navigators”’, and that structural contexts, while powerfully conditioning, are rarely unrecognized and hardly if ever totally determinant (Parekh, 2000).

It is now necessary to sound a note of caution. It may be broadly right that invitations to self-reflection almost invariably now give rise to reflexively aware attitudes to the force of social structural conditions. What, however, are we to conclude about those actions which are less deliberative? As Weber schematized, there are forms of social behaviour which are not thought through beforehand, reflexively or otherwise. Is this the point at which cultural necessitarianism is reinforced rather than weakened, the point at which the model of Distinction remains the key to understanding? What is the relation between necessitarianism, emotion and habit? I cannot possibly provide a full answer to that question here, but I do wish to indicate its importance by pointing to the apparent lack of concern for issues pertaining to reflexive awareness in debates about domestic violence. The Metropolitan Police conference, ‘Enough is Enough’, at the end of October 2000, was linked with the project of taking a ‘national snapshot’ of domestic violence (and one might see both Distinction and The Weight of the World also, in one aspect at least, as sharing something of this status as snapshot). Preliminary indications are that the mise-en-scène is not much structured by reflexive awareness (at least at the point of action). One case coming out of this project has been reported as follows:

Jane is 27 years old. She has a three-year-old son and she is afraid. ‘I bet they're looking up, laughing at me. He said he wanted me dead, and he's getting closer.’ … Her possessions and those of her son have been destroyed by a fire which started four hours earlier. They were out when the blaze began. They will never live here again. Below a group of youths are milling in the street. In the dim light it is difficult to pick out faces, but Jane suspects her ex-boyfriend is among them. She pulls up her sleeve and shows a scar from a knife wound … ‘We had a row at a friend's house. I threw my mobile at him. He lost it. He's a nutter.’ … Newham's community safety unit … are not surprised when Jane says she is reluctant to give a statement.

(Hopkins, 2000)

Sociological exploration of reflexive consciousness at the point of action is hard to come by. Unedited cctv footage of street violence rarely reveals self-consciousness in action; while covert recordings of football hooligan reflection on skirmishes to come indicate disdain for or prohibition of analytical reflection. Methodological, cultural and ethical barriers to research on violence at the point of violence, or passion at the point of passion, mean that dramatists, lyricists, screenwriters, novelists and poets have the field pretty much to themselves. If this is so, it is a prime reason for holding the humanities and the social scientists squeezed together, rather than, as with Bourdieu and the sociological tradition in general, levering them further apart (Boyne, 2000).

MISERY

Class appears to be less unrecognizedly determinant of social action now than was the case just a quarter of a century ago. It has even been overtaken in the ranks of social-structural influences by ethnicity, economic geography, gender and—quite possibly—genetic inheritance. Post hoc self-reflection typically recognizes the power of such influences. However, there is a limit to the advance of reflective/reflexive consciousness as the consciousness-mode of the moment. Much behaviour is not rational but emotional or habitual, and it seems quite possible that the necessitarianism discussed in Distinction may be harder to dismiss as outmoded in these cognitively impoverished contexts. This may be the case even if we do not accept the continuing fidelity to necessitarianism that we still regularly find reproduced by cultural intermediaries of one sort or another. Against that background, how do we understand the relationship between Distinction and The Weight of the World? The first shift to consider is that from inclusion to exclusion.

A point from which to begin is Loïc Wacquant's distinction between the urban deterioration found in the housing projects of the USA and the decaying suburbs around the major French cities. Listing the conditions of ‘joblessness, housing degradation, violence, isolation and immigration’ which, from the 1980s on, were represented within a ‘fantastical’ transatlantic discourse of ‘ghettoization’, Wacquant suggests that the ‘decomposition of the French working class’ has been exacerbated by a stigmatizing symbolic domination which has to be endured ‘on top of socioeconomic exclusion’ (Wacquant, 1999: 130-1). It is immediately tempting at this point to turn to the class inclusionism of Distinction, where, despite the symbolic domination to which the working classes are permanently subjected, we can find that they have ‘everything which belongs to the art of living, a wisdom taught by necessity, suffering and humiliation and deposited in an inherited language, dense even in its stereotypes, a sense of revelry and festivity, of self expression and practical solidarity with others …’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 394). Is this the fundamental contrast? In the 1970s, those subject to symbolic and economic domination were described in terms of their own defence mechanisms of social inclusion, whereas in the 1990s defensive structures of class solidarity are less evident, revealing a picture of unadorned exclusion. Would this not be the vicious side of the end of ideology, where those, now reflexively aware, experiencing symbolic and economic domination have no compensating illusions at all? Is this what Bourdieu meant by misère du monde?

To show that this is indeed one of the key contrasts between these two works is not so straightforward. Bourdieu is a structural sociologist. The ‘atoms’ of his social world are agents acting within fields. When he is dealing with housing projects, however, he finds generic displacement, ‘people who have nothing in common’ forced ‘to live together, either in mutual ignorance and incomprehension or else in latent or open conflict’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 3). For Bourdieu these places are, and he italicizes this statement, ‘difficult to describe and think about.’ No single point of view can capture what is happening there. What is needed are ‘multiple perspectives that correspond to the multiplicity of co-existing, and sometimes directly competing, points of view’. This multiple perspectivism can be assessed by comparing the interviews reproduced in The Weight of the World, which Bourdieu carried out. He did an ‘interview with a project head in the north of France’. The project manager used to work against the bureaucratic grain and had some success in dealing with difficult cases because of her intricate network of connections within the community. The effort of struggling to subvert and negotiate constricting procedures was tiring and often thankless. When she moved to a different area, she was less able to intervene in specific cases, but still had an understanding of the local social structures and regional bureaucratic conditions. Her view of the shifts from the 1970s through to the 1990s was clear:

You have these huge HLM [public housing] projects in which you've got retirees who've spent a life … you know a normal life. They have acquired this apartment, they've furnished it, they've spent their whole life working. With the 1977 reforms in financing, some of them could have acquired a little property, but some were too old and they said, ‘no, it's not for us, our apartment is fine, let's keep it.’ So the idea of buying their own little house, I don't think it even entered their minds, and they were very satisfied with their apartment, and their neighbourhood, with their environment, with their life and all. And then the economic crisis: things change and you get another type of population which is there because it has no choice. So we are in another period, the people who come to these apartments, it's not because they've found a job, it's because they can't find another apartment. The ones who come to make demands, who come to demonstrate, are the retirees, people used to defending themselves, saying what they have to say, talking because they have rights, and so they continue to talk.

(Bourdieu, 1999: 197)

For Pascale, the project head, the long-term inhabitants of the projects are not excluded, but they do recognize the dangers of exclusion and will fight and talk. What about the more recent arrivals? Monsieur Leblond, described as a member of a working-class family, has a house with a garage and three bedrooms, and a 14-year-old daughter at the local lycée, which he describes as having ‘80 percent foreigners in the total school strength … Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Portuguese …’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 17). Lots of them, Leblond says, are unemployed, especially the younger ones. He knows that they have often not been helped very much by the state, and also that many of them have different cultural backgrounds. He suggests that some of the problems can be traced to individual families, and that it is not so much a matter of inherent ethnic characteristics, even though these differences can give rise to minor irritations. He has lived, worked, played and brought up children in an erratically supported multi-ethnic neighbourhood and has a matter-of-fact approach to the difficulties of doing this, which concludes with a somewhat whimsical wish that young people in particular were more adaptable and prepared to compromise. That wish, however, finds absolutely no echo in the discourse of François and Ali. What is strongly echoed is Leblond's matter-of-factness, and the practical repudiation of basic racial difference. What François and Ali report is an up-close-and-personal life in their environment and nothing else. There is barely a trace of reflexive awareness of the field in which they are agents, and this is because this field does not exist and hence their powers as agents do not exist. Bourdieu does not put it like this, at least in part because his whole self-construction as a sociologist refuses the idea that there could be any such phenomenon as genuine social exclusion. Such a thing would be a contradiction in terms. Reluctant to rehabilitate the notion of anomie (for normless subjects cannot exist within his framework of social understanding), his response is emotional, his concept that of shared suffering:

I did not have to force myself to share in the feeling, inscribed in every word, every sentence, and more especially in the tone of their voices, their facial expressions or body language, of the obviousness of this form of collective bad luck that attaches itself like a fate, to all those that have been put together in those sites of social relegation, where the personal suffering of each is augmented by all the suffering that comes from co-existing and living with so many suffering people together—and, perhaps more importantly, of the destiny effect of belonging to a stigmatised group.

(1999: 64)

For Francis, a counter-cultural street-level drug counsellor, what Bourdieu (quite rightly and compellingly) sees as suffering, he sees as thoroughly rooted in exclusion:

They had been rejected, at school, they were in remedial class, they were already excluded! They were already excluded at school, so when they left school, they had a mindset of exclusion. And since they didn't have the wherewithal to get a job, well then, they were excluded …

(1999: 210)

Bourdieu's own examination of social conditions in the housing projects, from the points of view of administrators, savvy street-workers, traditional working-class members and both French and immigrant youth, presents a complex picture of socially accomplished local understandings which, however, no longer connect to any macro-culture other than that from which the processes of exclusion can be seen to have emanated. Bourdieu does not much use the term social exclusion, but compared to the cultures of the dominated which he examined in Distinction, the absence of necessitarianism is explained not by reflexivity but by the lack of a countervailing culture to impose and legitimate what is necessary. For those interviewed in The Weight of the World, the experience of exclusion is often unmediated. In this context, the sociological task must first be to reveal the condition, which Bourdieu has done. What comes next?

THE AESTHETIC OF SUFFERING

Four years after The Weight of the World, Bourdieu published Pascalian Meditations. In this later work, he looked back on his study of social suffering and saw it first (Bourdieu's own word—première) as of methodological significance, as an attempt to avoid the imposition by the researchers of their epistemic categories and assumptions, therefore allowing access to the field of social scientific knowledge for those normally excluded (Bourdieu, 1997: 74). This delicate recognition of exclusion as a problem of method is followed by a reminder that the intellectual's dream of a universal viewpoint valid for all is just part of the scholastic illusio. This double move, methodologically aggressive yet politically self-effacing, provides Bourdieu with a strong response to those who might object to his departure from the territories of the excluded. He has allowed them to speak, and at the level of the field can do no more thereafter than underline the strengths of good social science. What does it mean to remain at this level of description, to comment upon what is described only by polishing the methodology and closing off avenues of criticism from those who might not agree with his approach, or who might think there is further to go? He does not explain that many of those interviewed lack powers of agency⁴ because they are largely located within unformed or fractured or multiply chaotic fields. He cannot advocate resistance because there is insufficient field sedimentation to make it worthwhile embarking upon specific countervailing strategies. This minimum level of analysis is absent from The Weight of the World because apparently there is nothing to be done, except to allow the condition to be described by those suffering it, and sometimes to help them through sympathetic social explanation to come to terms with the condition. This is now the imposition of necessitarianism from outside. It parallels the aesthetic of the upper classes described in Distinction: just as truth, beauty and honour are socially unconditioned, so is the suffering of the socially excluded.

Pierre Bourdieu came out of the sociological tradition of Weber and Durkheim. This is the tradition of the reliable and rigorous witness, but it is also the tradition of the theorist and diagnostician. In The Weight of the World the meta-reflections of the latter are carefully diverted away from the interview subjects. The consequence of this is a vacuum that will be filled, perhaps, in part, by work and thought on some of the following questions. Does The Weight of the World aestheticize the projects and their inhabitants? Does an undertheorized multi-perspectival sociological ventriloquism lead to a potential mannerist deformation in representations of social existence? How, within Bourdieu's approach of reflexive multi-perspectivism, is the reinforcing of stigmatism to be avoided? What are the gradations between bearing witness and voyeurism in these contexts? Can a variety of under-formed social milieux be identified, contrasted, classified? These questions are difficult, but as a place to begin, and to begin to conclude, we can examine the first of them.

There is, as Jon Cook (2000) reminds us, a well-established tradition, beginning with Brueghel and also the English pastoral, of the aesthetic appreciation of the poorer circumstances of others. If Bourdieu's The Weight of the World is description without explicit diagnosis or recommended treatment, is the appropriate prototype within this lineage? Jean-François Millet's The Gleaners, for example: three women working in the field, is it shown by the painter just like it was? Millet worked within the contemporary conventions of artistic composition just as Bourdieu is very clearly self-located within the context of professional social science. As Mirbeau pointed out (cited in Shiff, 1998: 201), Millet focused on the people rather than the ground on which they stood, and the same might be thought true of Bourdieu's strategy in The Weight of the World. However, Millet was a romantic who framed his subjects against a glowing world, and it is probably the case that Bourdieu cannot be said to do that. Perhaps a more up-to-date model is Richard Billingham; his work is certainly less auratic than Millet's. He took photographs of his parents and brother in their Birmingham council flat over a period of seven years. Some of them were shown as part of the Sensation exhibition in 1997. The most measured critical response to them was that they were ‘part of an international movement in photography towards kitchen-sinkish verité’ (Adams, 1997: 39). However, a different and indirect response is worth noting. Under a part headline, ‘disease that just won't go away’, an article by Paul Barker (2000) in The Independent on Sunday, which opens with the question, ‘Is Britain obsessed by class?’, is wrapped around a 10-inch by 7-inch colour reproduction of ‘Ray and Elizabeth’. They are Billingham's parents, and he has photographed them, prematurely aged and overweight, separated by the family dog and cat, all on the brown velvet settee, part-covered by a pastel flowered quilt, eating a definitively unappetizing TV dinner. Whether intentionally or not, Billingham's parents are framed as an intractable social problem. He did not mean for that to happen. In fact there is no intentional theoretical framing by Billingham at all, but there is an aesthetic which is even tinged with a little of Millet's sentimentality. He says of ‘Ray and Elizabeth’, ‘it looks like any hack photographer could have come in and taken this photograph—it doesn't show you anything about the relationship I have with them. I wish I'd never put it in the book, but it's so well known now I just have to live with it’ (cited in Barber, 2000).

For Bourdieu's work around the Projects, there is not a single perspective. These situations are, he thinks, hard to deal with. They are fluid and varied, in ways that are really quite different—at least as far as he was concerned—from the fluidity of being always ahead of the game that marked the progressive faction of the petite bourgeoisie as he saw them in the 1970s. He was therefore reluctant to theorize these new spaces. He showed them to us, but allowed them to declare for themselves what they are. He did not want to fix the meanings of these spaces in advance, since he knew that they are places of kaleidoscopic experience, and so he did not always clearly say that these are places of exclusion, but that is what they declare themselves to be. In truth, he did not need to be specific that these are spaces of social exclusion, because it already followed from his social theorizing. Thus he did say exclusion to the extent that these exteriorized social spaces are not centred, they are difficult, without central principles. They are places of exclusion because they require multiple perspectives, because they are not yet, and perhaps never will be, governed by the clear quasi-regulations of a relatively clear field. So did Bourdieu aestheticize the inhabitants of these non-spaces? The answer is double: to the extent that they are defined outside of regular social space their impact is romanticized (like Millet's figures, and as—at the limit—is the case with Billingham's photographs); to the extent that they must speak for themselves within the social order, they are heard as a ‘disease that just won't go away’. Neither position is tenable. The Projects and their inhabitants are very clearly inside the social. They do not constitute an unformed Other, but an immensely complex sociological phenomenon which must be theorized, and the two opening steps need to be the recognition of individuals without agency within the social world, and the contrast between the countervailing cultural defences of the working class, described in Distinction, and the stark absence of anything analogous in The Weight of the World.

Notes

1. This is an extension of arguments found in Subject, Society and Culture (Boyne, 2000: ch. 1). I am grateful to Manchester University Sociology Department, and to the delegates to the conference ‘Bourdieu in the 21st Century’, organized by Derek Robbins, for their responses to the original presentations. The text that follows does not repeat the arguments to be found in the book, which I did briefly go through in the two lectures. Hence, although there may be references to sociological imperialism vis-à-vis its denial of even a residue of unconditioned subjectivity, and to the regrettable gap this opens and widens between social science and the humanities, the arguments for characterizing Bourdieu as quintessentially sociological in this respect will not be found here. There may also be reference to the core antinomy within Bourdieu's thought, two versions of which are (1) the effective modelling of a flexibly transposable habitus on the condition of the petite bourgeoisie at the same time as demanding principled political resistance as the model for action by cultural intermediaries, and (2) refusal of the human subject as any kind of prime mover, but making that same subject an agent of fields which are implicitly and sometimes explicitly constructed as Machiavellian collectivities. Again, the argument for the inevitability of these contradictions, and for their celebration in the context of a less voracious sociology, but for their cautionary diagnosis in regard to Bourdieu's work, which in the tradition of the sociology of everything and everything sociological is the very best that we have, will not be found here.

2. Another example can be drawn from the BBC television series The Sins. In episode 1 (24 Oct. 2000), ‘Pride’, Len Green, the main protagonist played by Peter Postlethwaite, says, ‘That's what I hate about the working class. Once, just once, try to better yourself, and what do you get?’ Len Green, unlike Bourdieu's subjects in 1979, but now in common with his examples in The Weight of the World, is aware of the processes. Calls to order within working-class milieux have now assumed the status of cliché. It would make an interesting research project to see to what extent they now emerge out of the cultural intermediary fraction of the petite bourgeoisie to a greater extent than they do out of the working class itself, as is pretty much the case with Barbara Ellen's newspaper commentary on the film (which made no mention of the fact that Sir Kenneth MacMillan was the son of a miner, or that Philip Mosley, one of the Royal Ballet's best dancers, is the youngest of his generation from a Barnsley family with a strong mining tradition [Wainwright, 2000]).

3. An updated reference list of the petit bourgeois activities listed in Distinction as running from Aikido to Zen might include personal trainers, loft-living, espresso machines, Giorgio Armani, Jake and Dinos Chapman and (but only if you live in Germany) golf.

4. When Angus Stewart (2000: 8) referred to ‘agency as a critical aspect of social inclusion’ (bold in original), he said nothing about those contexts in which no agency is possible. This, one might think, is hardly surprising, since surely such contexts hardly exist. Will we not at least find potential for agency wherever we look? If we could have got Bourdieu to answer this question directly, the answer would probably have been a qualified negative. It is a source of great loss both that we will never know for sure and that we will not have the chance to see whatever answer it was transcended by his further work.

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